The Ringlords
by Maenad1
Summary: A dismal Ring story: if more than Boromir's sanity and the abduction of two young hobbits had gone awry at Amon Hen.


It all went wrong when Gandalf went down in Moria.

They all agreed on that much, the Kings of Gondor and Rohan, of Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain, the Master and Thain, even the Lord himself. Things turned sour that day, and stayed that way, like milk left in the sun too long, for all their efforts. There was so little they had understood of his intentions, of how he had planned to traverse the rotten paths into and through Mordor, how four small Hobbits, two tall Men, an Elf and a Dwarf and an elderly Wizard, conspicuous in the extreme, were to evade the myriad of Orcs that sprang from the toothy rocks of the land as if they had given birth to them, how the Ringbearer was to complete his quest at the last, with his spirit wracked with temptation.

Dissent grew in the Company; Boromir, ever more insistent, ever more desperate, reminded them of the need of his city, of the help he had pledged to bring, and Frodo grew daily more despondent and less decisive, sleepless and silent, while his servant hovered, unable to assist, at his side. With Gandalf gone, the Fellowship was less easy to divide than it had been. Aragorn, previously at least relatively dispensable, was now the party's only guide; Gimli and Legolas, between whom there had initially been an unspoken agreement that whichever group the first chose to accompany, the second would go with the remainder, if only to be rid of each other's presence, were now inseparable; the young hobbits would go with Frodo, whatever their misgivings, but what use they might be along the way, none could say.

Then they came to Amon Hen. It was the final dividing of ways: where the river had previously allowed them to delay their choice, rowing the middle road towards both destinations, the Falls of Rauros now blocked the way. To the west lay Minis Tirith, siege and battle and bloodshed; to the east, Mordor and all that the Shadow encompassed.

No real debate took place; few words and many uncomfortable stares. On the one hand, to do what they had set out to seemed daily more impossible, on the other, there was little to be said for a glorious last stand on the walls of the White City. Finally Frodo begged an hour's reprieve and went off up the hill to wrestle with the matter on his own. For a time, then, the Company had debated, being free of the presence of the subject of conversation and finding it easier to discuss what _he_ might do, than what _they_ might, until they noted the absence of Boromir and the lateness of the hour, and rose in some alarm to seek out their missing comrades.

Both returned, then, the one borne by the other. Boromir was running, and shouting, with Frodo, limp and pale, clothes rent and stained dark with blood, in his arms. "Orcs!" he hollered. "An army of Orcs, who pay no more heed to the sun's light than to a candle flame. We were assailed upon the hillside, and the Ringbearer is grievously wounded."

More than grievously: the Ringbearer was dead, and nobody believed Boromir's tale; not when a familiar chain flashed telltale from a tear in the collar of his tunic. Furious, Aragorn tore the Ring from Boromir's throat and flung it onto Frodo's still breast, breaking the links of the chain, and with it the bonds of the Fellowship. Sam's sword had been first from its sheath, though he could scarcely tell friend from foe through the veil of grief and tears, and others followed, and they might have fallen upon each other, but then Orcs _had_ come, a torrent of them, big and bold as Boromir had said, suggesting their might have been at least a seed of truth to his story.

Guarded by Boromir, Merry and Pippin fled downhill, towards the river; Gimli and Legolas retreated west, axe and knife wielded like implements in separate hands of the same being; half his mind and both his hands devoted to fighting, Aragorn was unable to prise Sam from his vigil over his master's body, and eventually the battle drove them apart.

It was some time before any segment of the Company located another again, not until Boromir's horn, blowing wildly for assistance, gave them a clue as to the direction and they came upon him, lying alone in a glade, but for the company of Orc carcasses, pierced by many arrows. Only Aragorn found him alive, or at least alive enough to point a trembling, red slick finger and mumble around the blood that gushed from his lips: "They took the halflings," before the breath fled from him.

On the Orcs themselves were found signs: the letter 'S' and a white hand, tying them to the service of Saruman, the White Wizard and traitor of Middle Earth and, retracing their steps Man, Elf and Dwarf found the body of Frodo, but the Ring and Samwise gone. Further inspection of the body revealed that Frodo had been stripped of other treasures: Sting, his precious sword, his _mithril_ coat and the Star-Glass given him by Lady Galadriel. Could Sam have taken these and fled with the Ring, in the confusion? Possibly, but it seemed more likely that the Orcs, finding a dead Hobbit and a live one, had taken what was valuable from the former and all of the latter, and were returning to their master. Spurred on by the fear of the Ring in the hands of Saruman, and concern at the idea of the Hobbits in the hands of Orcs, after they had laid their fallen comrades to rest in two of the boats given to them by the Elves of Lothlorien (the last of the three was nowhere to be found), the three remaining members of the Company turned aside from both Gondor and Mordor and set off on the now famous pursuit of the Orcs across the lands of the Rohirrim. What followed is well recorded: how the three hunters encountered a company of riders, captained by one Éomer, who reported slaying the Orcs, and how Aragorn discovered the tracks of Hobbits, fleeing the site of the battle, and he and his companions followed them under the eaves of Fangorn Forest. How they had met a Wizard, all in white, who had been, not Saruman, but Gandalf, returned from the grave, and how he had told them that Meriadoc and Peregrin were safe and well in the company of the Ents, the tree folk, and how they in turn had told their tale, and he who was now White had turned almost grey again, hearing the fate of the Ringbearer, and that Sam was now astray alone. How even so, together they rallied the ailing king of the Rohirrim, and withstood the siege of Helm's Deep, how Merry and Pippin raised the Ents and quite literally tore the walls of Isengard asunder, how Gandalf's words broke Saruman's staff and Isildur's heir reclaimed the use of the palantir, how the desperate ride of the Rohirrim, and the eerie swords of the sleepless Dead brought aid to faltering Gondor on the Pelennor fields, and at last an alliance of the Captains of the West faced the Host of Mordor at the Black Gate.

What is known of Samwise's deeds is fragmentary, a little at the beginning and a little at the end. One Captain Faramir, the brother of the fallen Boromir, reported that he came across two unlikely creatures wandering the land of Ithilien. The most remarkable was a wizened, shrunken thing, haggard and wiry and foul, somewhere between a frog and a goblin, the other was a young man with the stature of a child, and the former was attached to the latter by a length of grey rope, tied about his ankle, that tormented him so much that he whimpered and hobbled more than walked. Both had been taken into the custody of the Rangers and questioned, and Faramir had learned something of their history.

Samwise Gamgee was the name of the young man, or Hobbit, rather, and his captive was Gollum, or Sméagol. Master Samwise had a quest to complete, in the name of his Master, who had been cruelly murdered, though by whom he would not say. A quest that concerned Isildur's Bane. Gollum was a footpad put to use: Samwise had been attacked by him one evening and had managed to subdue him. Knowledge had saved the creature from instant death: Sam needed to get unseen into Mordor, and only Gollum could show him the path.

It was a difficult case, but Faramir at last determined to set them loose. There was no deception in the Hobbit, and his devotion to his dead Master's cause was touching. Besides which, the Quest had apparently been sanctioned by Mithrandir, the Grey Wizard, and those with wisdom did not meddle in the affairs of Wizards. But, being a perceptive man, Faramir observed that the same canker ate at both guide and master, though while Gollum was almost wholly consumed, on Samwise it had only begun to nibble.

Nothing is known of the journey, after Captain Faramir lost sight of the new Ringbearer, until the stories met up again. At the Black Gate the Mouth of Sauron appeared, and presented them with an Elven sword and a small box filled with earth like faerie-dust, and told them there was no hope left. But Gandalf refused the terms presented to him with the strained bravado of a man backed into a corner, and they were beset. Then, inexplicably, the battle turned, the Nazgul wailed and fled to their lord and, leaderless, the charges of the Orcs and such Men as were under Sauron's sway fell into chaos. Heartened, the Captains of the West rallied, and drove them back, back through the Gate and at last even to the foot of Barad-dû r.

As far as anyone could discern, the Tower was empty, the Eye put out, its minions dead or fled and, cautious as rabbits exploring a fox's den, Aragorn and Peregrin (Meriadoc having been left behind in Gondor, convalescent), Gimli and Legolas, the sons of Elrond Halfelven, Imrahil of Dol Amroth and Éomer, with the death of his uncle on the Pelennor fields now king of Rohan, and a company of guards crept into the Enemy's stronghold in search of an answer to the mystery of their impossible victory, half hopeful, half fearing trickery. They found many folk, in such cells as they dared to investigate, creatures that might once have been Men, or Elves or Dwarves, many of whom it seemed kinder to kill, so far had they descended into the great darkness. And in one large chamber, far from the rest, they found Samwise.

He was standing transfixed, and at first glance he might have been made of stone. At a second glance it could be seen that he was trembling, from the hair on his head to the hair on his toes. Only when Aragon knelt before him did he come to himself, and then he only cried "Strider!" and swooned into the Ranger's arms. The Ring still hung about his neck.

Days later, when he finally roused they heard snatches of his story from him, or at least as much as he was willing to tell.

"They got Gollum first," he said. "That Stinker, he tried-- under the passage, at the tower-- but it don't matter, an' I got away right enough. But he came after me, leastways until the Orcs got him, an' nearly got me, too. That was when I lost the sword an' the box. An' I kept on, but I couldn't rightly say which way was the proper one. Master might've known, but not me. But there weren't no water, except in the Orc camps, an' I tried stealin', but my luck failed me, just at the end, an' they took me up to the Tower. _He_ was there…" And there Samwise shuddered and paused and would say no more for some time.

"_He_ was there," Sam reiterated, when he was at last coaxed into speaking again. "I thought it was all up, then, and He was going to get It. Don't know why He didn't-- only, I held up the Lady's Glass, an' I said if the world was fair at all, Him an' all His works ought to be locked up in a glass this big. Then I-- said something. Elvish words, though they didn't mean a blessed thing to me, if you understand me, except for '_Elbereth_.' An' the glass _glowed_, so bright as to make you weep if you could use your eyes at all, an' when I could see again He was gone, an' the glass-- well, where's my pack?"

The pack was duly found and the glass produced from within it. Miraculously, or perhaps terribly, the glass had been transformed, or more accurately, _inverted_. What had given light now seemed to absorb it, a black, sucking thing that gave the impression of watchfulness without having any eyes to watch with.

Sam would not touch it, but said uncomfortably: "Scared me right well, it did, so I put it where I wouldn't have to look at it and-- well, I was half out of my mind, I think, an' I forgot poor old Gandalf was dead. I thought he might like to look at it."

Until that moment, nobody had marked the absence of Gandalf, though in fact no one could recall seeing him since the beginning of the battle. His body was not to be found amongst the dead, nor his presence amongst the living; he had simply vanished as if he had never been, or as if he had been a ghost. Which, some said darkly, was not entirely unlikely. That business with the Balrog had never been adequately explained.

Nor could anyone explain why the Ring had not, at the end, been cast into the Fire. Surely it would have been a simple enough matter, to take it from the body of the unconscious Hobbit and fling it into the depths of Mount Doom. Quite simply, it had occurred to no one, and continued to occur to no one, or at least no one would mention it. Neither wholly forgotten nor ever remarked upon, the Ring hung beneath Samwise's shirt collar, a dormant menace that everyone silently hoped would simply obliterate itself.

It did not.

For a time, the Fellowship remained together, until the coronation of Aragorn as King of Gondor, and then they parted ways: Gimli returning to the Lonely Mountain, Legolas to Mirkwood, Merry and Pippin to the Shire. Only Sam remained with Aragorn. At the beginning of things, he said, he had pledged that he would return by the long road with Mr Frodo, or not at all, and since there could be no homecoming for Frodo, there would be none for Samwise. So he would stay, and do such things as it was fitting for a Hobbit to do to help heal the land.

King Elessar sent him, at his own request, back into Mordor, with such men as were willing to accompany him, to attempt to reclaim the land. First, he used the earth from Galadriel's box, then he sent for more, which the folk of Ló rien gave willingly, asking only to be left alone, and gradually the Black Land bloomed and became green again. Those men that had gone with him expressed a desire to stay, so the King assigned them to him permanently, and created him Lord of Nórëva Lohta, which had once been Mordor. More came, in time, Men and Dwarves and even Hobbits-- but no Elves. Though he offered them every inducement, no Elf would set foot in the land of Samwise the Strong, and they continued to take to their ships in droves, all but those from the land of Mirkwood, though the Elf Havens were continuously and mysteriously burned, hindering their flight. One of the first tasks undertaken by Samwise was to clear the land of Sauron's creatures, and foremost of these, the Nazgûl. Eight rings were recovered from these, the ninth having been lost on the Pelennor fields, and they were distributed by Samwise thus: First to the King, to whom he owed his life, then to Meriadoc and Peregrin and Fredegar Bolger, his Master's kindred, then to Gimli and Legolas, to Éomer of Rohan, whom Aragorn swore was faithful and worthy of the honour, and lastly to Imrahil of Dol Amroth, one of the great captains of the battle at the Black Gates.

Merry and Pippin had returned to the Shire to find it languishing under Saruman's sway. They had roused the populace to rebellion, and there had been a great battle at Bywater, in which many Men and Hobbits, as well as Saruman himself, were slain. In time they had become respectively Master and Thain of their own lands, and Fatty Bolger, released, much reduced, from the hole in which he had been confined, had been revealed to be a rebel leader and local hero and was promptly elected Mayor. These three formed a triumvirate that, in time, extended the dominion of the Shire to include even the land of Bree, and once and for all demolished the Old Forest that had loomed ominously in the nightmares of so many Hobbit children, and made of it an ordered, if not particularly fruitful, farmland.

King Thranduil of Mirkwood had perished in a raid on a nest of particularly venomous giant spiders, which King Elessar had ordered to be utterly exterminated as a special favour to his friend, Lord Samwise, who had a horror of spiders for reasons he refused to elucidate, and Legolas had succeeded him, as the most able administrator amongst his sons. Being himself constrained by ties of friendship, and unable to depart for the West, he banned his folk from all such departures, and punished with death all those caught leaving secretly. Some few did escape, it was said, but only those in Valinor heard their tales, and ever the spiders outnumbered the Elves, spinning webs on the edges of their glades to catch the unwary.

Gimli's arrival at the Lonely Mountain was well received. Both King Dàin and his son, Thorin Stonehelm had been killed in the recent assault on the mountain by Sauron's forces, and in lieu of an heir to the throne, the surviving members of Thorin's company were acting as a council of elders. These were soon displaced by a popular uprising of young dwarves who raised Gimli to kingship. He reopened congress between the Dwarven and Elvish folk and, with the aid of his friend, King Legolas, even succeeded in clearing Moria of the majority of the Orcs that had infested it. As both monarchs deemed it as yet too perilous a place for either Elves or Dwarves to dwell in any great numbers, they raided Lake Town and Dale, and other such villages of Men as were within their reach, as well as such nomadic tribes of Wild Men as passed their way and set them to work mining _mithril_, though a mixed garrison was always maintained to preserve order, as well as a guard of honour over the excavated tomb of Balin.

Lady Arwen Evenstar conceived of a sudden of an abhorrence for the world of Men and came not to the bridal bed that awaited her in Gondor, instead taking ship for the West with her father and brothers and many of the household of Imladris. Aragorn was inconsolable, and went for some time into seclusion, leaving the management of his realm in the hands of his trusted Steward, Faramir, who had assumed the position after his father's suicide. At length, however, the King emerged and, to further cement the alliance between Gondor and Rohan, took to wife one Éowyn, daughter of Éomund, and sister of the present King. It seemed, however, that her husband was not entirely to her liking, as scant months later she was found in the bed of Lord Faramir, to whom, it was said, she had at one time been betrothed. The generally zealous guardsman who made this discovery, one Beregond, immediately, if reluctantly, slew the faithless Queen, but, due to some old sentiment, allowed Faramir to escape. For this lapse he was himself summarily executed, but the damage was done, and it was rumoured that Faramir, embittered and hardened and resembling his father more with every passing day, was raising an army from the men of distant Harad, to march on Gondor and remove what he referred to as 'Nùmenor's Decaying Flower.'

Outraged at what they called 'the murder of a daughter of their noble house,' Rohan for the first time refused to send men to Gondor's aid, and there was talk that King Éomer was considering an alliance with the renegade Faramir, against his old friend.

This the populace viewed with mixed feelings. Though King Elessar was well beloved in his own right, it could not be denied that since his accession the kingdom had declined at an even greater rate than it had during the great War, and in later years whispers stated that he was little more than the puppet of the Halfling Lord to the east.

At any rate, the famine continued unabated.

There had been a few early years of prosperity, during which the population had swelled tremendously, and then, by degrees, the crops had faltered and the soil had hardened. Only the Shire still yielded anything like a decent harvest, but most of that was exported, now, to ration out to the starving denizens of Middle Earth, so, while the Hobbits had plenty of gold in profit, they had little food to spend it on so, thin and sad and discontented, many of the smaller families were departing, seeking the simpler, ungoverned life of their ancestors.

In what remained of the old workshops under Nórëva Lohta, Lord Samwise, who had an unsurpassed gift with flora, was attempting to grow a strain of wheat that would produce more grain and faster, to alleviate the situation. Entire fields lay permanently damaged with his failed endeavours, but in others a crop of golden, seductive ears sprang up that none could eat and live.

Plague followed hard on famine's heels, which at least had the virtue of reducing the population. It reminded people of the Black Breath, but as there were no Nazgûl left to spread it, no one could conjecture where it was originating. A hale and strong man would take to his bed one day, and succumb within a week. The King was powerless to cure it, being unable to find a supply of _athelas_. Though he sent out riders to scour the kingdom from one end to the other, and begged assistance from his friends, none of the precious kingsfoil was ever discovered. Like the legendary White Tree of Gondor, it had vanished from Middle Earth.

None had ever been brought to Nórëva Lohta, but of all the untampered with seeds that were brought to the land of Lord Samwise only one would not grow: the _mallorn_ that had been presented to him in the box of earth by Lady Galadriel. This took root and sprouted and grew to a sapling, then abruptly withered and died. Moreover it appeared its roots had wound themselves around some stone, deep beneath the earth, for it would not be uprooted.

It stood there, grey and cold and dead, while the people perished and the cities were depopulated, while even the locusts died for want of food. While the great Houses of Meriadoc and Peregrin and Fredegar grew to consume all the lands of the Shire and eventually themselves dwindled and starved and vanished into the hills. While the armies of Faramir and Éomer descended on the undermanned walls of Dol Amroth and Minis Tirith and put their Prince and King in chains, and while Harad and Rohan then turned on each other and tore the city to rubble in the malice of their treachery, so that the survivors scattered into innumerable hostile tribes. While Gimli and Legolas, fleeing uprisings in their own lands, took ship at the Havens and were sunk off the coast of the Elvish Isle as abominations. While Lord Samwise, weary and stretched and sunken as the Gollum creature who had once guided him, petitioned to the Elves to be allowed to sail with them and was denied, and at last made war upon the race he had so deeply venerated, and drove the last of the Fair Folk from Middle Earth, and while he took the Ring and the ruined Star Glass to the top of the Falls of Rauros and leapt with them to his death, joining his Master at last. While the denizens of Nórëva Lohta came to themselves as if from a dream, and fled the land they once more called Mordor into the anarchy that surrounded it, seeking their vanished kindred. While the Ring and the glass with its prisoner rolled together down the river to the sea, and while the glass was buffeted by rocks and waves, growing thinner, sliver by sliver, while the Ring was unchanged. It stood there, clinging obstinately to the earth, testament to a withered heart and a blighted land.

For all I know, it stands there still.


End file.
